Friday, June 27, 2014

In addition to the water news out of Detroit, the UN has declared the U.S.to be in violation of international human rights laws by not supplying cleanwater to the poor.

BY KAREN PIPERAuthor and professor of postcolonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri

Flushing a toilet in Detroit has become a sign of white privilege. There, residents are facing what people in poor countries have experienced for decades: massive water cut-offs. Thousands of connections are being shut off per week as the city attempts to pay down its debt and attract a private contractor to lease its bankrupt water utility.

This is what water privatization looks like.

It looks like Johannesburg, South Africa, where a multinational water corporation moved in and began installing pre-paid water meters in black neighborhoods. “No money, no water,” the head of Aquafed, a coalition of private water corporations, stated. Cholera broke out. Riots ensued.

Is this what is next for Detroit?

In one of the most segregated cities in America, the predominantly black urban center is suffering, while those in the mostly white suburbs continue taking showers, washing cars, and filling swimming pools. This is an environmental justice issue, a human rights issue, and a national sovereignty issue. Detroit’s water customers may well receive cut-off notices from France in near the future, where the world’s largest water multinationals are based. These companies, Suez and Veolia, are currently in the market for bankrupt American utilities. But the U.S. government says we cannot afford to supply our citizens with clean water anymore. We will try to make the poor pay instead, and possibly pay France. Water rates in Detroit have gone up 119 percent in preparations for privatization.

Finally, the UN has taken notice, stating the U.S. is in violation of international human rights laws by not supplying clean water to the poor. “Sick people have been left without running water and working toilets,” a panel of three experts from the UN Human Rights Office said in a statement issued on June 25. “People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook.” UN special rapporteur Leilani Farha said that if the water disconnections disproportionately affect African Americans, “they may be discriminatory, in violation of treaties the U.S. has ratified.”

It is yet to be seen if the U.S. will pay attention to the UN’s scathing review of its water policies. At the very least, the UN has provided an embarrassing commentary on our dwindling status in the world. We have been gutting our water infrastructure budget since the days of Ronald Reagan and now need around one trillion dollars to keep it up and running. Instead, Republicans have consistently pushed for privatization of our water utilities, opposing what the Cato Institute calls “water socialism.” They want water capitalism, it seems.

Meanwhile in Detroit, Mayor Mike Duggan claims there has been “significant misinformation” about the water cut-offs. Things are not so bad, he said. There were only 46,000 water cut-off notices in May, and only 4,531 cut-offs—only 4,531 new toilets that will not flush, babies’ bottoms that cannot be wiped, wounds that cannot be cleaned. He thinks that is not too much. Water and Sewage Department Director Sue McCormick has also tried to allay residents’ fears, stating, “Unpaid Detroit water bills affect only Detroit customers. No suburban customers pay any extra on their bills to make up for unpaid bills on Detroit addresses.” People in the suburbs will be fine, she assures us; they will not be asked to pay more to keep the water running downtown. As for the U.S. government, it may be forced to pay more by the UN. If the U.S. does not correct this violation of human rights law by providing financial assistance to those who cannot pay for water, it faces UN punitive actions and a further lessening of status abroad.

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Karen Piper is the author of The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos (Minnesota, October 2014), Cartographic Fictions, and Left in the Dust, which the Los Angeles Times has called an “eco-thriller” that every “tap-turning American” should read. A regular contributor to Places magazine, Piper is also a winner of Sierra’s Nature Writing Award and has published in numerous academic journals. She is professor of postcolonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri.

"A wonderful book—full of commitment, deeply moving, with stories of real people affected by corporate water grabs. I highly recommend The Price of Thirst."—Maude Barlow, chair of the board of Food & Water Watch

"Will conflicts over water define the 21st century as the battle to control oil did the 20th? Karen Piper gives us a vivid, inside view of the bizarre world of the water privatizers and their friends in the World Bank. She also offers inspiring account of their opponents: the emerging global movement to make clean water a universal human right."—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

BY ANGELINA E. CASTAGNOAssociate professor of educational leadership in the College of Education at Northern Arizona University

Comedian Louis C.K. has recently made critical comments of Common Core and standardized testing that have lit up the Internet. He did not parse words, nor did he attempt to avoid offending. Comedians are incredibly adept at saying things most of us wouldn’t dare say. Toward the end of the school year, he tweeted to his 3.3 million followers: “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!” And later: “I trust a teacher over Pearson or bill hates [i.e. Bill Gates] any day of the week.” In an often-heard comment about C.K., an Internet responder notes that although his work can be considered sad or mean, it is refreshing. The debate around Common Core and standardized testing is the subject of many other blogs, articles, and books, and it is not one I wish to engage here. Instead, I want to suggest that educators take a cue from comedians regarding the value of throwing niceness out the window.

To be nice is to be pleasing and agreeable, pleasant and kind. A nice person is not someone who creates a lot of disturbance, conflict, controversy, or discomfort. Nice people avoid potentially uncomfortable or upsetting experiences, knowledge, and interactions. They do not point out failures or shortcomings in others but rather emphasize the good, the promise, and the improvement we see. Niceness compels us to reframe potentially disruptive or uncomfortable things in ways that are more soothing, pleasant, and comfortable. This avoidance and reframing are done with the best intentions, and having good intentions is a critical component of niceness.

Within schools, niceness often defines appropriate—and even good—behaviors, interactions, norms, and policies. Most educators are nice people with the best of intentions regarding the schooling they provide to students every day. Despite their good intentions, we continue to produce structures that harm children. Those being harmed most often and most significantly are children of color.

Prior research [1] has meticulously explained the multiple ways in which race and institutional racism influence schooling, but whiteness is a foundational component missing from most studies of difference and power in schools. My recent book, Educated in Whiteness, centers the notion of whiteness and illustrates how whiteness works and what it means for youth, teachers, educational leaders, and efforts to achieve equity. By whiteness, I mean structural arrangements and ideologies of race dominance. Whiteness maintains power and privilege by perpetuating and legitimating the status quo while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion. A strategic element of whiteness is the notion of niceness. Although niceness operates in many places, schooling is a particularly illustrative context in which to explore the role of niceness in the perpetuation of inequity. A central claim of my book is that whiteness works through nice people. This is especially the case when one examines common approaches and discourses around diversity in schools.

Not unlike many other places across the nation, in the “Zion School District” (an anonymous district in Utah), diversity-related policies and practices were always engaged in nice ways that would not upset the status quo. Powerblindness came to life in educators’ attempts to ignore, silence, or explain away any power-related hierarchies, inequities, or injustices. Specifically, educators operationalized powerblindness through appeals to learning styles and varied teaching techniques, human relations, and character education, and by politely erasing heterosexism and homophobia. They engaged colorblindness when they silenced race talk and racialized issues. When students tried talking about race, they were schooled in—and through—politeness. When confronted with racialized achievement gaps or race-based inequalities at school that could not be silenced, educators turned them into issues related to language, social class, or refugee status. Deficit ideologies were another mechanism at work when explanations for student failure were located in student and family characteristics. In each of these instances, patterned and pervasive racial inequity was left unnamed, unexamined, and unchallenged. At the same time, educators operationalized equality, meritocracy, and individualism in their efforts to build particular school cultures, create conditions for certain students to succeed, and compete in the current school-reform race. All these mechanisms work in service to whiteness. They are so common and prevalent that they allow whiteness to thrive without much effort.

This is why it’s so important to remember Derrick Bell’s call (in 1992's Faces at the Bottom of the Well) to be strategic and outmaneuver policies, practices, and systems that appear neutral but actually result in persistent inequity. In fact, the stories in Educated in Whiteness suggest that this outmaneuvering may require difficult ideological and structural work. If our allegiance to equality, meritocracy, colorblindness, and powerblindness results in patterned inequity and the reification of whiteness, perhaps we need to let go of (or at least question) those ideologies. If our schools are built on assumptions that equal opportunity exists and meritocracy is fair, perhaps we need to restructure our schools for the obviously unequal society in which they operate.

As just one possibility the “student need index” and “equity framework” developed through a project called the Advancement Project appear to be important contributions to local conversations about whiteness, race, and racism in schools in the southern California region. Its “student need index” compiles various data points to highlight which schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have the greatest need for additional resources. In other words, it doesn’t rely on ideological commitments to equality or maintain a false illusion of meritocracy. Instead, it is attempting to frame a conversation that says the playing field is not equal, and kids in particular neighborhoods and particular schools must have additional resources if we are serious about closing achievement gaps, paying down our educational debts, and truly aspiring to “equality and justice for all.” This is not a feel-good-conversation to have.

Perhaps educators need to engage more of the rude, and yet refreshing, dialogue that comedians model.

"Angelina E. Castagno's up-close look at how whiteness operates in actual schools, and within one school district, offers a rare, ethnographic portrait of how policies ostensibly aimed at effecting educational equity actually end up reinforcing the status quo. We still have much to learn about how whiteness and racism function in everyday life, and Educated in Whiteness is unusual in the field, offering an important way of seeing how whiteness operates across the system."—Thea Abu El-Haj, Rutgers University

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

While on a book tour for Heartbeat of Struggle, Yuri Kochiyama and Diane Fujino
speak on April 24, 2005, at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Photo by Nobuyuki Okada.

BY DIANE C. FUJINOProfessor of Asian American studies and director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Appearing in Life magazine’s coverage of Malcolm X’s assassination is a photo of an Asian woman holding the head of the slain human rights leader. In that March 5, 1965, issue, there is no mention of the woman’s race and she is not named. This is symbolic of distortions in history. Asian American activism is rendered nameless and invisible. Black nationalism is misrepresented as separatist. After Yuri Kochiyama passed away on June 1, 2014, Life magazine republished that same photo, now naming her in the headline. But now I fear another distortion, of Yuri being remembered for two moments frozen in time: this photo and her time in the concentration camps. These were important influences in Yuri’s life, but the wartime incarceration and Malcolm X each have complex histories. And Yuri’s life and activism extend well beyond this narrow framing.

The work of researching and writing Yuri’s biography, Heartbeat of Struggle, changed me in ways I hadn’t imagined. Beginning with our first interview in December 1995, I got an entrée into the political world encircling Yuri in Harlem. When I first entered her four-bedroom housing project apartment, I encountered walls completely covered with political posters of Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and numerous political prisoners; flyers announcing the latest activist events; and shrines to her children Billy and Aichi and her husband, Bill, as well as to those who had passed in her life. The kitchen table was covered with the work of writing to political prisoners; responding to the many requests for information, archival documents, or interviews; maintaining her color-coded address book; and with numerous newspapers and books. I later discovered that that table was a major source of tension. Her family struggled to find a place to sit and eat, while Yuri insistently worked there, making her artistically styled picket signs, writing for movement publications, and corresponding with political prisoners through the wee hours of the night. Her home was alive with the buzz of visitors, phone calls, and a sense of urgency to get out the latest on the campaigns to free Mumia, David Wong, Yu Kikumura, Mutulu Shakur, and Puerto Rican political prisoners.

As I stayed with Yuri during multiple week-long interview sessions, hosted her in my home, and accompanied her to events during what would become a 20-year friendship, I got to meet many of her political associates, and to go on several visits to see Marilyn Buck imprisoned at Dublin, California. I remember accompanying her from New York to Washington, D.C., in 1998 for the historic Jericho March and rally to defend political prisoners. There I met Muhammad Ahmad (formerly Max Stanford), who was a major leader in the Revolutionary Action Movement, who had worked with Malcolm X, and whose intellectual and political prowess inspired Yuri—who in turn pushed for a wider audience for his book, Toward Black Liberation. I remember Yuri being inundated with a near non-stop flow of old friends wanting to say hello and young people wanting to meet one of their activist heroes. Another time, Yuri and I went to attend an event on Puerto Rican political prisoners at Hostos Community College. We were already on the subway before I discovered that Yuri, a New Yorker of more than 35 years, was expecting me, a Californian, to navigate our trip. Somehow we made it, and I got to hear the most inspiring stories by Jose Lopez about his brother, Oscar Lopez Rivera, behind bars since 1983 for his struggles for Puerto Rican independence. Yuri was particularly thrilled to get to see the children of Carmen Valentin and Dylcia Pagan, women incarcerated since 1980. If Yuri were alive she’d urge you to watch the powerful documentary The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez, on the reunion of Dylcia and her son, sent into exile when Dylcia and her husband went underground to join the clandestine wing of the Puerto Rican struggle.

Yuri was widely known for her generosity and her humility. She and Bill opened their home to strangers who had no place to stay, for social gatherings every Friday and Saturday night, and for a multitude of political meetings. Yuri was attentive and nurturing. While young people wanted hear to Yuri’s stories, she was more interested in learning about their lives and astounded me by remembering details years later.

The representations surrounding Yuri in death of that photo with Malcolm and of her wartime incarceration signal her social justice work. But they miss the greater meaning of her activism, her interpersonal practices, and ultimately, the ways she saw the promotion of human dignity as inextricably linked to the struggles for decolonization. Yuri’s critiques of imperialism in the US, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and her six decades of radical activism deserve deeper study so that we can locate Yuri in her rightful place in history.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The extraordinarycolor and variety of textiles in this afternoon
dress, ca. 1872, attest of the refinement of the French textile
industry. Creator: Charles Frederick Worth. This image is posted
under terms of ARTstor.

Fashion, clothes, and culture

BY CRISTINA GIORCELLIProfessor of American Literature at the University of Rome Three

Habits of Being I dealt with the significance of clothing accessories on the construction of the modern body and Habits of Being II was concerned with the (literal and metaphorical) circulation of clothes in the modern system of fashion. Fashioning the Nineteenth Century: Habits of Being III concentrates on the significance of fashion and clothes in the nineteenth century, both in Europe and in the United States. Because with industrialization, fashion, the city, and the flaneur were born at that time, the authors of these thirteen essays—by scholars, artists and fashion designers—considered it crucial to analyze why and what this triad meant for Western society at large.

For the first time in the West, fashion and clothes were considered indexes of culture, not only of history (as Louis XIV had declared), by both great writers (such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé) and early sociologists (such as Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel). Various epoch-breaking social changes characterized the long nineteenth century, and each of them can be traced through the styles of clothes that accompanied it: for women, from the neo-classical to the knickerbocker suit, passing through the bell-body, the bustle, and the hour-glass shape; for men, the three-piece suit was created, signalling bourgeois thriftiness, austerity, and self-control. The century ended, however, with the effeminacy of the dandy and the spectacularization of clothes and pose. And it is precisely the dandy who affords the link to the twentieth century, when women (thanks to Coco Chanel) started wearing white flannels as men had done till then. By dressing like them, women started challenging men’s social supremacy not by contrasting but by assimilating. Revealingly, an acute observer of fashion and manners like F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night muses: “They [the women] were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them.” But if much occurred in a century, so much more has happened through the course of the past one and into our days.

It is thus evident that anyone studying the nineteenth century would profit from reflecting on apparel, in all its social and cultural implications and from a wide variety of disciplines: history, literature, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, fashion history, etc. Far from being trivial, the subject of clothes affords a unique (and pleasant, but not “light”) angle from which to look at the characteristics of a whole period.

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An example of the beauty of printed and dyed fabrics
that were used in the 1840s. Image posted under
terms of ARTstor.

On industrialization and the fashion industry

BY PAULA RABINOWITZProfessor of English at the University of Minnesota

In 2012, we put the finishing touches on Fashioning the Nineteenth Century just as the blockbuster exhibition “Impressionism and Fashion” was on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It traveled to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago’s Art Institute the following year, acquiring an additional noun to its name, becoming “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” in the process of presenting 79 paintings and 14 elaborate dresses (some seen in the paintings by Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and many others on the walls behind the vitrines) to a constant flood of spectators, most dressed down in streetwear of sneakers, jeans, and jackets.

With rooms devoted to corsets and fans, shoes and gloves, and a few men’s hats, as well as huge wall texts by Émile Zola, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, this paean to the nineteenth-century European body armored in finery offered its viewers entry into a world of fashion that was then emerging into public spaces, even as its very presence on boulevards and on canvases hung in parlors hinted at its eventual demise. Once fashion hit the streets, it became fair game for all. Before dresses were worn and became visions for painters and poets, they were made, fabricated by skilled hands who worked materials that had been made by still others—usually far from Europe’s shores.

While the dresses by Charles Frederick Worth on view in this exhibition (or in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum) were couture, styled and sewn for individual buyers, fashion was also a commercial venture. This woodcut from the 1840s by Utagawa Hiroshige, titled “Narumi Station: Shop Selling the Famous Product Tie-dyed Arimatsu Fabrics,” gives a view into the local commerce of silk in Japan as it was industrializing and opening to trade with the West.

Everyone wears clothes. And with industrialization, clothing, too, became an industry, as a number of the essays in this volume describe. Jacob Riis’s photographs of sweatshops in New York’s Lower East Side presented a dark contrast to the bright images of family picnics taken en pleine depicted by Renoir. Here the family is also together, but joined by scissors and threads and scraps from the dozens of trousers churned out daily by father, mother, and children. The brutal conditions Riis found among New York’s immigrants have been outsourced off shore.

Catastrophes like the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed more than one hundred young women when they jumped to their deaths because exits were locked are now occurring in factories throughout Asia, mostly horrifically in last year’s collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. This contradiction emerged in the nineteenth century: On the one hand, a world of elegance and finery, this month captured by the newest Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute exhibition of another Charles (1950s designer Charles James), whose highly constructed gowns both look back to the nineteenth century and look forward with “an undeniable modernity,” according to Roberta Smith. And on the other, an industry mired in exploitation as most of us seek out cheap jeans and t-shirts for our daily wear.

Entranced by the past, as so many of us were as we marveled at the bustles and top hats which appear so distant from our lives, we are still its captives.

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Cristina Giorcelli is professor of American literature at the University of Rome Three. Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Giorcelli and Rabinowitz are co-editors of Fashioning the Nineteenth Century: Habits of Being 3, the third installment in the Press's Habits of Being series.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

BY LORI EMERSONAssistant professor of English, as well as the founder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab, at the University of Colorado at Boulder

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#MALcasestudies is a weekly blog series featuring treasures that exist in the University of Colorado at Boulder's Media Archaeology Lab. See links to previous posts below.---

It's been a privilege to blog here over the past month about artifacts in the Media Archaeology Lab. And while most of my posts have been related to how I used the Media Archaeology Lab to write Reading Writing Interfaces—using the MAL to experiment with dead-ends in interface design as well as interface designs that embodied certain ideological notions of what constitutes "user-friendly"—this last post dips slightly into my next project, which is a network archaeology called OTHER NETWORKS. In short, I've gone from looking at the hardware and software affordances of interface design in personal computers to looking at the hardware and software affordances of both defunct and dominant networks before or even outside of the reign of "the internet."

One of the first books I read after I finished Reading Writing Interfaces was Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (published in 1993), and this was where I noticed his strange use of "internet," without the article "the." Over the coming months, as I worked through manuals on internet protocols, especially TCP/IP (which was created in 1983 as the standard language for networks to communicate to each other) I could see how, despite all the shoulder-shrugs in the literature about where exactly the term "the internet" came from, referring to the singular, monolithic network that defines most of our waking lives now, "the internet" had emerged from decades of heterogeneity. From "the internet" (introduced as far as I've been able to find in the bible for TCP/IP called Internetworking with TCP/IP from 1988), to "internet," to "internetwork" (with the emphasis on being a go-between among networks), to "internetworking" as a verb, to "internetworking" as an adjective to describe the process of transferring packets of information to and from any kind of telecommunications network. So then the question became this: what were all these different networks that directly or indirectly caused the creation of TCP/IP and later "the internet"? What are the affordances of these networks? What sorts of communication spaces did they make possible or impossible? In other words, how do these networks work and for whom do they work? And, more difficult to pin down, why do histories of the internet almost always move directly from the ARPANet of the late 1960s, to the creation of the personal computer in the late 1970s, to the creation and eventual widespread adoption of TCP/IP in the 1980s, and then right to Tim Berners-Lee's "invention" of the World Wide Web in the early 90s? What's gained and what's lost from this astonishingly inaccurate, lopsided narrative?

The first part of the OTHER NETWORKS project I've been focusing most on is titled "50 Years of Other Networks, 2015-1965" and is in the lineage of a few critical-creative hybrid media studies books. "50 Years of Other Networks," then, will be a catalogue of networks existing outside of or pre-dating the Internet. Consisting of a stack of unbound, loose sheets of paper packaged in a box, each sheet—beginning with the present and moving back into the past—will provide metadata of a sort, a description, and short analysis of an "other" network so that the material form of the project allows readers to actively dig through a network archaeology.

Even though the project is in its early stages, it's clear to me already that a significant part of it will have to be dedicated to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In short, the first BBS system, called a Computerized Bulletin Board System, was created in 1978 and was originally conceived as a computerized version of an analog bulletin board for exchanging information. CBBS soon gave way to BBS, each of which had a dedicated phone number, which generally meant that only one person could dial in at a time. Also, most BBSes were communities of local users because of how prohibitively expensive it was to make long-distance phone calls; these local users could use it to share files, read news, exchange messages publicly or privately, play games, and even create art.

A BBS I'm particularly interested in is The Thing—a BBS that New York artist Wolfgang Staehle started in 1991, just one month after Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web. It was used as a kind of online community center for artists and writers, a virtual exhibition space, and later a node in a network of international The Thing BBSes. But what particularly fascinates me about The Thing is the way in which the network itself was conceived as an artwork rather than any individual pieces of content that were uploaded to it. As Staehle writes, "The whole meaning of it would come out of the relationships between the people and not the modernist ideal of the single hero artist that the market loves..."

An advertising card for The Thing network.

The MAL is particularly fortunate to now house a good portion of the The Thing hardware, which Staehle donated to us earlier this year. While all the machines are password-protected and all passwords long forgotten by Staehle, the material traces of one of the most important digital art networks are still, I think, meaningful—from the filth of the keyboard on the SGI Indy from heavy use by its system administrators, to the BBS number affixed to the front of the machine, to the oddity of The Thing's eSoft IPAD machine which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Apple iPad but instead stands for Internet Protocol Adapter. ESOFT is actually a Colorado-based company that was still in existence until December 2013 just a few miles down the highway from Boulder, and one of their accomplishments was their creation of the IPAD—a wonderful kind of liminal, technological object in that it tried to straddle pre-internet networks and the internet itself. eSoft started out making a BBS system called the TBBS for the RadioShack TRS-80 computer and later for IBM PCs; in fact, before the Internet, Microsoft used TBBS to provide technical support for their customers. In 1993, ESOFT created the Internet Protocol Adapter as a means to provide access to TBBS using Internet protocols. The IPAD soon turned into what eSoft called an "internet in a box" appliance that gave companies a way to have a presence on the Internet with just one piece of equipment. So while The Thing network is itself profoundly important to the history of social media networks, The Thing hardware also makes "radically present," once again, that crucial transitional moment in time when "the internet" was not yet dominant and when one could still choose from competing networks with profoundly different affordances.

In short, my hope is that OTHER NETWORKS will help uncover and even reconstruct all those "internetworks" that existed throughout that crucial fifteen to twenty year period before the launch of the World Wide Web—a period which is on the verge of being lost, if it hasn't already been lost, and which reminds us of a time before "the" internet.

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